Bridgewater, Va. – The Kline Campus Center is home to Bridgewater College’s only dining hall and features several different food stations for students to choose from. In response to the Coronavirus, several changes were made to the operating of the dining hall.

The most noticeable feature are the signs and directions posted throughout the dining hall. There are distancing guides as students wait in line both outside and inside as well as arrows signaling the direction to walk when inside.

The tables are spaced out and have limited seating. There are only two people per round table and for the long tables, students have to be sitting 6 feet away from each other. This leads students to use the option of to-go boxes more often, which they provided to students for free this year and they can take the food back to their dorms. This is the easiest and fastest way to use the dining hall since larger groups cannot sit next to each other.

Students are also not allowed to fill up their own cups or water bottles at the drink station and provided with disposable cups instead.Students keep their to-go box and the next time they go to eat, they are provided with a new clean one to use.

Another change is the elimination of self service. Students cannot serve their own food. The workers have to plate everything for you except pre-packaged items like apples or bagels.

“Before we could self serve and now we can’t and we do not have as many workers,” said Leanne Dolan, ’20, a current student in the master of athletic training program who works at the dining hall a few times a week, noted that self service is the biggest change as well as the biggest struggle compared to last year.

That requires more people to serve each individual student. Leanne stated that before it might have taken one worker to stand at each station and now it takes up to three. Parkhurst is hoping to find more people to hire including students for whom it is an easy and accessible job especially as it means not having to go off campus.

While much has changed about the KCC this semester, it is still somewhere students can go at most times of the day, as many times as they want, to get fresh, homemade food.

Doyle says that her favorite part of working there is all the free food she gets to eat as well as being around her friends.